Tuesday, September 29, 2015

If you are one of our loyal Karas Kustoms Instagram
followers, you know that we have been doing a 10 week giveaway due to reaching
the 10,000 follower mark. Well, 9 weeks have gone by and we are finally at the
grand prize giveaway. When we started this journey of giveaways, I made mention
of an EPIC final prize. I loosely hinted here and there about it off and on,
but let anticipation grow. Well the time is now upon us and I can reveal the
10K GAW final prize.

Karas Kustoms presents W.A. Karas Signature Ink 29. This pen
is handcrafted by Bill Karas and is 1 of 6 in a limited series. The pen takes its
name from being designed around the current Karas Kustoms INK fountain pen and copper’s
atomic number, 29. It features the Karas Kustoms Ink barrel anodized in one of
our newest colors, brown, with a hand-hammered Copper clipless cap and copper
grip section featuring hand-hammered accents. The nib is a Medium Cursive
Italic ground by Mark Bacas (@mbacas on Instagram).

The idea for the pen came about as we prepared for the 10K
giveaway when Bill made mention of his willingness to do an actual “custom” pen
for the final prize. We brainstormed a bit, but the ultimate design came
straight from his brain as he worked on the parts and created the pen. His own
touches can be seen through the intricate hand hammered “cap band”, no two caps
are the same in this series and each was hand-hammered by Bill as. The same can
be said for the grip sections. Each pen is a one of kind piece and the first in
the Karas Pen Co Signature series.

No ordinary nib was going to go into this pen, and so we
sought out a pen that would truly be worthy of this pens style and character.
We turned to The Nibgrinder, Mark Bacas, who ground us several of his signature
Cursive Italic nibs. This medium Cursive Italic will provide thin side strokes and
nice wide down strokes adding to the overall flair the pen will produce as it
enhances your writing. Just what this pen needed.

Number 1 in this series is being given away on Instagram. If
you would like a chance to win, merely follow @karaskustoms on Instagram and
follow the directions on our post about this pen to be entered into the
giveaway. Numbers 2-6 will be auctioned off in mid-October on Instagram or via
this blog, so stay tuned for more information on the.

In other news, this post will be the OFFICIAL start of the
Karas Kustoms Blog weekly/bi-weekly/monthly giveaway contest. We have to nail
down the time frame on how often we are going to do the actual giveaways, but
we have some pretty nifty thoughts on the items that will be given away.

To start things off, I decided to pick the items myself.
This giveaway features a Karas Kustoms/Dudek Modern Goods Cube in burnt orange
with white delrin inserts. The burnt orange is a color we don’t normally use as
it tends to vary even more than the normal orange. This particular Cube looks
quite nice and shows the full color, the white inserts really pop and lend a
completely different look to the Cube.

The pen being given away is a restored vintage Eversharp Skyline fountain
pen in Dubonnet Red (repaired by myself). Eversharp enlisted the help of famed industrial designer
Henry Dreyfuss in 1940 to design this pen. Dreyfuss incorporated design
features that were reminiscent of locomotives he had designed, the rounded cap
derby and sweeping lines of the pen gave the pen “movement”. The Skyline
featured technological advances inside as it used a special tube insert to
allow it to be carried in flight. To quote Richard Binder, “The best feature of
the Skyline was the justly renowned Eversharp nib; the company offered Skylines
with everything from manifold accounting nibs as rigid as nails to italics with
wonderful flex, and collectors today greatly prize Skylines for their writing
qualities.” This particular pen features a rigid Fine nib that is perfect for
small accurate handwriting.

To win this pen, you need to do a couple of things. They
aren’t very difficult and you should be able to accomplish them with a quick
note and a photo. First write a short 1-3 sentence explanation of why you
deserve this giveaway. Second take the note and lay it next to an area in your
home, office, car, bathroom that this cube will occupy. Email the photo to karaspenco@gmail.com with the subject "Cube/Skyline Giveaway". All entries will
be assigned a number and the random number generator at www.random.org will be utilized to pick a
winner. The winner will be chosen on October 12, 2015 and announced on the blog and via the Karas Pen Co Instagram
account @karaspenco .

*We may chose entry photos and put them on the blog to show others what we are looking for and to encourage others to join, so keep sending us awesome photos of why you deserve this Skyline/Cube combo*

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Working here has its perks. I get to engage in a lot of “pen
talk” with people that admire and use pens. I get to watch pens being designed
and the process they all go through. I get to spend a good chunk of time
hanging out with some pretty cool people. And then every once in a while I get
to use a really cool new concept pen before the official release date. That’s
what happened here.

A little background on the pen is in order. If you are an
internet savvy shopper, you have heard of a website called Massdrop. Massdrop
describes itself thusly, “an online community for enthusiasts that provides
people across several communities – from audio and electronics to quilting and
cooking – a place to connect, discuss their favorite products and activities,
and buy those products together.” They accomplish this by listing polls their
members vote on, when an item on a poll reaches a certain number of votes,
Massdrop reaches out to the manufacturer of that item and ask for a partnership
in order to sell the specific item, this is called a “drop”. The more people
that purchase the “drop” the lower the price point on the item. It’s an
innovative way to get some good deals on quality items.

We have partnered with Massdrop on numerous pen drops. And
each once has been highly successful from our perspective. Massdrop runs a
pretty tight ship and they focus on great customer service and communication.
It’s a really great way to get your product out to the consumer at large.
Recently Massdrop approached us with the idea of doing a Massdrop Exclusive
release. Meaning we would release the product via Massdrop before we released
it anywhere else. The idea was intriguing and had definite merits. So Dan set
about creating a pen that would fit the Massdrop community at large. From this
was born the EDK pen.

The EDK is a pen that has another story behind it, but I won’t
bore you with more of those details, rather I will take you through the main
features of the pen itself and then give you my thoughts on it after using it
out in the field, by that I mean in a college classroom environment.

The pen itself takes design elements from the Retrakt and
the Bolt and molds them together into one pen. It’s slightly shorter than
merely screwing a Bolt Barrel onto a Retrakt Body. The reason for that is that
the EDK was designed specifically around the Schmidt P8126 refill. What’s that
you ask? It is a specific “cap-less” roller ball ink refill that has a one year
cap-off time, meaning the ink will not dry out for a year when left uncapped.
That makes this refill the perfect refill for a click pen. There are a number
of other reasons why the P8126 is such a good refill. I will go through my own
thoughts on the refill as we go along.

I have a three hour lecture class, and I am a pretty
thorough note-taker. I find I learn better when I take notes. Also I am a
fountain pen guy, I enjoy writing with a fountain pen and engage more when I
take my time and use a fountain pen. I have used a lot of different pens for
quick note taking, quite a few of them are pens we make and sell. I also use my
Pilot Vanishing Point for quick notes as it has a retractable nib. But even
that pen isn’t the same. It writes well, but if I end up needing to take a lot
of notes my hand cramps as the Pilot VP design makes it necessary to use a
specific grip to get around the clip. So for the most part I have stuck to
using a myriad of different capped fountain pens: from the Karas Kustoms
Fountain K to the Pelikan M200 to a personal favorite the TWSBI 580. They all
have their qualities and quirks but the biggest drawback is they require
recapping after each use and during a 3 hour class that can get a little old.

Enter the EDK. I grabbed one of the very few samples we had
made and put it together. First thing I noticed is the size, the pen itself is
shorter than any of our current pens, but it is still a substantial pen. It has
a decent weight, and it balances quite well. How well, you can turn it upside
down and get it to stand on its own on the back end of the click mechanism.
That’s how well balanced the pen is. But in the hand it falls right into the
webbing between my thumb and forefinger and rests comfortably. The grip area
has several recessed rings, that give the pen a nice added texture, but they
aren’t distracting or rough. I was using the matte black anodized pen and the
matte finish is a not as “slippery” as our bright dipped anodized pens. Overall
a solid design and top points in functionality.

Performance wise is where the pens really shines for me. The
minute I touched the tip to the page I knew I was in for an awesome writing
experience. And that’s exactly what I got. The ink flow is wet, but not enough to
be distracting or streaky. Due to the amount of notes I take, I tend to use
lower quality paper, stuff that doesn’t hold up well to really saturated inks
or broad nibs. I was worried about how the P8126 would handle on my “lo-fi”
paper, I shouldn’t have worried. It held up like a champ. While the ink “feels”
wetter, in reality it isn’t. The combination of the rollerball mechanism and
the ink chemistry just make for a superior writing experience. Combine that
with the balance of the pen, and you are in for a truly otherworldly writing
instrument. I have always felt like the Parker Style refill required too much
pressure or a heavy pen to ensure the pen writes consistently. And the Pilot G2
refill feels sloppy to me. Writing with a G2 refill takes my poor handwriting
and makes it completely illegible. Not so with the EDK, the balance is superb.
I can write with nearly zero pressure and I am left with consistent readable
lines. No smudging, no blotting, no areas of ink void due to lack of pressure.
The ink behaves itself at this low pressure as good as it does with hard
pressure and I don’t need to worry about bleeding or smearing. And due to the
size and balance of the pen, I was able to spend almost 2 hours taking notes
without any hand fatigue. A complete win as far as performance is concerned.

Lastly I decided to conduct a head to head test between the
EDK and my Stealth Pilot Vanishing Point. I decided I would go back and forth
on note taking between the two pens, working one paragraph each. I started with
the VP.

Having just used the EDK, the size and shape of the VP are
even more noticeable. But the weight isn’t something that has ever bothered me
with the VP. It lays in the web of my thumb and forefinger as well. So for a
paragraph of writing, the overall experience of handling the pen itself was
about what I would have expected. That being the clip was the only thing that
bothered me. I have an EF nib on my VP, it allows me to write on the worst
paper available and not worry about bleeding or other issues. It seemed a bit
dry, but has always felt that way. It tends to be scratchy and I thought when
compared to the EDK it would seem even scratchier, but that wasn’t the case.
After a paragraph of writing, my hand was fine, and the experience was ok.
Nothing to rave about but also the complaints I thought I would have weren’t
present.

EDK time, again the overall size and shape jumps right out
at me. There is a big difference in how the pen feels when compared to the VP
and that remains the biggest takeaway. Much smoother than the VP, not nearly as
fine of a line than the VP. Balance is again comparable even though the EDK is
a bit heavier. But it writes so nicely that I enjoyed myself more when using it
than I did when using the VP.

And that’s basically my final thoughts on this one. From a
fountain pen guy, that truly ENJOYS writing with a Fountain Pen, the EDK is the
ONLY non-fountain pen that provides
that same level of enjoyment. There are two other factors, balance being one
and the P8126 being the other, that make this pen just an outstanding writer. I
fully expect to trade in all of my other ballpoint pens for a stack of EDKs in
every color and material combination available. But I have to be patient. Just
like the rest of you wonderful people.